central chimneys the Colonists built to service
their capacious hearths.

In the kitchens, fireplaces were practically walk-in affairs, as large as 10 feet wide, 6 feet
high, and 6 feet deep. Full of andirons, pokers,
tongs, shovels, spits, kettles, cooking cranes,
ladles, trivets, frying pans, Dutch ovens, and a
built-in baking oven, it served all the family’s
cooking needs — and some of its social ones as
well, as flanking high-backed benches known
as settles made for warm gathering spots.

Early flues were so big that Benjamin
Franklin later estimated that all but a sixth
of the heat went up old chimneys. It took
an expatriate from Woburn, Massachusetts,
to improve on that. Born in 1753, Benjamin
Thompson was a Loyalist who eventually ended up in Bavaria, where he was given the title
Count Rumford for contributions as diverse as
founding a public park, inventing wax candles,
and devising a nutritious soup for the poor. His
greatest achievement, however, was designing
a fireplace with angled sides and a shallow
back to radiate heat and a streamlined throat
to increase the draw. Hotter and nonsmoking,
Rumford fireplaces were an instant hit on both
sides of the Atlantic during the 1790s and are
still built today.

But you couldn’t cook in a Rumford, so it
took the invention of the cast-iron cookstove to
hasten the end of the deep kitchen fireplace.
They started to make inroads in New England
in the early 1800s, though it’s debatable as to
the improvement they brought to women’s
lives. “The early stove,” wrote the archivist
Otto Bettmann, “was an appliance of marked
obduracy, a penal rockpile on which many
a good country wife prematurely spent her
beauty and strength.” As stoves improved over
time, however, the cooking fireplace became a
thing of the past, and by the 1830s, some of the
newly introduced Greek Revival homes were
being built with stoves, not fireplaces, their
narrow chimneys signaling fashionableness.

Still, so deep-seated was the idea of the
hearth that even these homes had mantelpieces, though they surrounded a stovepipe rather
than a fireplace. Later, it was not uncommon
to see houses with central heating sporting
mantelpieces simply placed on a parlor wall,
acting as the focal point where a blazing
fire once was. After a while, New Englanders